"I'm engaged to Miss Sinclair. Her governor has given in at last. What price that? . . . I'm tremendously pleased, don't you know, because it's been going on for some time, and I'm awfully mashed, and all that."
Miss Sinclair! I remembered her—a romantic, fluffy blonde, improbably pretty, with dreamy eyes and golden hair, all poetry and idealism.
Such a contrast to Freddy! One associated her with pink chiffon, Chopin's nocturnes, and photographs by Mendelssohn.
"I congratulate you, my dear child," I was just saying, when an idea occurred to me. Why shouldn't I fall in love with Miss Sinclair? What could be more tragic than a hopeless attachment to the woman who was engaged to my dearest friend? It seemed the very thing I had been waiting for.
"I have met her. You must take me to see her, to offer my congratulations," I said.
Freddy accepted with enthusiasm.
A day or two after, we called. Alice Sinclair was looking perfectly charming, and it seemed no difficult task that I had set myself. She was sweet to me as Freddy's great friend—and we spoke of him while Freddy talked to her mother.
"How fortunate some men are!" I said, with a deep sigh.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because you're so beautiful," I answered, in a low voice, and in my earlier manner—that is to say, as though the exclamation had broken from me involuntarily.
She laughed, blushed, I think, and turned to Freddy. The rest of the visit I sat silent and as though abstracted, gazing at her. Her mother tried, with well-meaning platitudes, to rouse me from what she supposed to be my boyish shyness. . . .
What
